He received an email from Beeb executive Nick Vaughan-Barratt tipping him off about the Jim’ll Fix It host in May 2010.

Mr Vaughan-Barratt had been asked to prepare an obituary for the Top Of The Pops host who was “very ill”.

He wrote: “We have no obit and I am not sure we would want one. My first job in TV was on a JS show. I saw the complex and sometimes conflicting nature of the man.

“I’d feel v queasy about an obit. I saw the real truth!!!’’

Mr Vaughan-Barratt also emailed a BBC exec saying: “The dark side to Jim would make it impossible to make an honest film that could be shown close to death. But maybe one could be made for later.”

The executive then emailed Entwistle saying: “I gather we didn’t prepare the obit because of the darker side of the story. So something celebrating a particular part of his TV career is probably better than the (life) story as there are aspects of this which are hard to tell.”

But Entwistle, 50, then head of BBC Vision, said he did not read the email.

A £2million inquiry conducted by former Sky News chief Nick Pollard into the BBC’s decision to drop a Newsnight exposé of Savile after his death described the unread email as a “missed opportunity”.

He ruled the decision to axe the Newsnight probe, which would have unmasked the star 10 months before the ITV1 show that revealed the truth, was “flawed”.

But after studying 10,000 emails and texts Mr Pollard found no evidence that pressure had been exerted by BBC management to hush-up the DJ’s crimes.

Mr Pollard said the “most worrying aspect” of the Savile case for the BBC was “the inability to deal with the events that followed”.